Fonteyne's Tango Libre Wins Warsaw Grand Prix

Fonteyne's Tango Libre Wins Warsaw Grand Prix

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Festival director Stefan Laudyn also announced that the CentEast Market will "hopefully" expand next year to include films from Chinese independent filmmakers.

Belgian filmmaker Frédéric Fonteyne's Tango Libre [pictured] was named the winner of this year's Warsaw Grand Prix at an awards ceremony in the Polish capital on Saturday evening.

Tango Libre was premiered this year in Venice's Orizzonti competition - where it won the Special Jury Award - and is the final film in Fonteyne's trilogy about how women and love work after Une Liaison Pornographique and La Femme de Gilles. International sales are handled by Films Distribution.

Warsaw Film Festival's International Competition jury, which included China's Et Hu, Hungarian producer Jozsef Berger, Ankara Cinema Association's Ahmet Boyac?o?lu and Polish director Greg Zgli?ski, gave its Best Director award to Andrzej Jakimowski for his drama Imagine, starring Edward Hogg and Alexandra Maria Lara, while the Special Jury Award was presented to Tudor Giurgiu for his comedy Of Snails And Men. "I'm usually the Special Mention guy," Giurgiu quipped as he came on stage to accept the distinction.

The winner of the Competition 1-2 for first and second features was Sára Cserhalmi for Dear Betrayed Friends, with a Special Mention for The Wild Ones by Alejandro Fadel of Argentina, while this year's Free Spirit Award in the Free Spirit Competition went to Iran's Mani Haghighi for Modest Reception.

Micha? Marczak's Fuck The Forest picked up the Best Documentary prize in the Documentary Features Competition, with a Special Mention going to Nisha Pahuja's The World Before Her.

Other prizes included the FIPRESCI Prize for best East European debut to Russian filmmakers Alexander Kasatkin and Natalya Nazarova for The Daughter, the Ecumenical Jury's award to Operation E by Miguel Courtois Paternina and the NETPAC Jury prize for the Best Asian film to Wildlife by Adolfo Borinaga Alix Jr. from the Philippines.

Meanwhile, this year saw the eighth edition of Warsaw's CentEast market (Oct 19-21) and the fourth year of a showcase of "works in progress" being presented in Warsaw and Moscow to a select audience of sales agents, distributors and festival programmers.

In a change from previous years, the showcase was first staged in Moscow - at the new Red Square Screenings - on Oct 16 to an audience including representatives from Fortissimo Film, Global Screen, Rezo Films, Eye Institute, Neue Visionen, China Film Co., Yume Pictures and festivals from Locarno, Karlovy Vary, Telluride, Cluj and Cannes.

The ten-film lineup of projects in various stages of production were then presented in Warsaw on Oct 19 to another group of industry professionals including acquisition executives from Films Boutique, m-appeal, Revolver Entertainment, Wide Management, East-West Filmdistribution and AS Fidalgo.

Films previously shown as "works in progress" at CentEast have included Andrzej Jakimowski's first English language film Imagine, the opening film at this year's Warsaw Film Festival (WFF), Victor Ginzburg's award-winning Generation P which will be released on over 100 prints in the US on Nov 16 by New World Distribution, Roman Prygunov's no. 1 hit Dukhless, which has taken more than $10m at the Russian box-office since its release on Oct 4, and Czech director Bohdan Sláma's fourth feature Four Suns that premiered at Sundance in January. …